Talk:List of strengths in Civ3
Navbox for Strength pages Any reason not to create a navbox for this and similar concepts? It would be useful if, when on the Agricultural (Civ3) page, for instance, a navbox were present at the bottom to show all the other strengths at a glance, instead of having to navigate back to the main Strengths page first. I realize navboxes don't really work for mobile devices, but unlike Tabber, for instance, they don't actually break any functionality, so I wouldn't see that as a barrier to their inclusion. If no objections are raised, I'll be happy to begin creating such things for these and other pages where they may be useful. Russ3Z (talk) 18:02, May 29, 2017 (UTC) :Go for it! Exitwound 45 (talk) 22:15, May 29, 2017 (UTC) Renaming this and other "lists" pages I notice there are many pages with titles such as "List of xxx in GameY". My understanding was that "list of" pages in wikis are really more appropriate for collections of articles that share some common theme, but in which that theme or topic itself is not discussed in any detail, rather having its own page. Here, on the other hand, the list pages mostly seem to be theme pages that also list the member items of that theme. I would think it perhaps more appropriate to rename this article, for instance, simply to "Strength (Civ3)" (or perhaps "Civilization Strength (Civ3)"), where the lead gives an explanation of what a Civilization Strength is, followed by a section titled "List of Strengths". This would make searching a bit easier and linking much easier, in my mind. Categorization ordering would also benefit, though that's admittedly a minor point since sortkeys can handle that. As above, if no objections are raised, I'll be happy to start migrating appropriate pages to new names. Russ3Z (talk) 02:02, May 31, 2017 (UTC) :I hadn't thought of it that way. I guess I figured a reader would be on a civilization's page, say Indian (Civ3), and would click on Religious (Civ3), and would learn what they wanted from the explanations on that page. Exitwound 45 (talk) 03:04, May 31, 2017 (UTC) ::Hmm, those are good points as well. I guess my other thought was if someone was coming to the wiki directly looking for info on a topic like "Strength", their natural move would be to search for that. Having short name like that seems to help with the way your disambig page templates work, as well. Currently "Strength" is a disambiguation-type page, albeit for an entirely different concept from later games. I know that Civ II at least had a similar concept, as well. ::Regardless of the name, many of these "list" articles could use a little fleshing out in various ways, so I'll start doing what I can. Thanks for your comments.Russ3Z (talk) 12:35, May 31, 2017 (UTC) :I'm inclined to agree with Exitwound 45 on this one. It could be confusing to have similarly-named articles for different concepts (such as "Strength" and "Civilization Strength" for Civ3), though having an article with a title such as "Strengths (Civ3)" that redirected to "List of strengths in Civ3" could be one way to circumvent that problem. You could also just add the for template at the top of such articles, though that involves extra work of a different sort. ::On that note, might there be any value in having "for" templates at the top of articles that span multiple games, to point to the main overview/disambig page? I know I've often been looking at a concept, unit, etc (Bank (Civ3), for instance) from one game that makes me wonder about its versions in other games. Russ3Z (talk) 23:40, May 31, 2017 (UTC) :::Personally, I don't see the point in doing that. The for template is used to consolidate links to pages about an element or concept that appears in multiple games, thereby helping players find specific articles more easily. As the list of popular pages will confirm, readers usually visit this wiki to find information that relates to a specific game, so linking every article about a specific game or game concept back to an overview/disambiguation article about it wouldn't be helpful to anyone other than information sponges. Readers who are curious about the disambiguation articles can find them easily enough. -Mythril Wyrm (talk) 00:22, June 1, 2017 (UTC) :On a loosely related and more general note, I think "List of x'' in ''y" is an acceptable naming convention for articles with contents that don't have individual Civilopedia entries. If there are Civilopedia entries, then "List of x'' in ''y" can be a redirect to the main article. Other editors' thoughts or opinions are welcome. -Mythril Wyrm (talk) 21:19, May 31, 2017 (UTC) ::I can offer my own historical perspective: way back when I started here, I started with the Civ4 articles. In fact, List of units in Civ4 was the first article I created, and it was indeed just that: a plain list of unit names, wikilinked. (Or that must've been in the then-separate Civ4 wiki actually, but anyway.) Creating that kind of a list helped me to see which units already had a page and which ones did not, and it was then easy to just add all the missing pages one by one. You could see your progress by looking at the decreasing number of red links. ::I think it went the same for the other lists too. An issue I've had with these lists is that I haven't really liked to put any actual data to the lists, as then the data would exist on both the list and the individual pages, which is a surefire way of having the wiki eventually conflict with itself. This issue has since been somewhat relieved by the use of the Lua modules which allow the data to exist on one place only and to be rendered differently on different pages. The Lua modules still aren't very user friendly, so they aren't the perfect solution either. ::So anyway, after I created those lists, other people have expanded them with intro sections and such. I don't mind, I think it's great, but when a simple "list" is amended and refined enough, it becomes more than just a list, at which point the article probably should be renamed, like from "List of units in Civ4" to "Units (Civ4)". ::I certainly think it doesn't make any sense to have separate articles "Unit (Civ4)" (or "Units (Civ4)") and "List of units in Civ4": there should only exist one of those. I'm a big fan of redirects, I think the more we have those the better! So all of those pages should exist but two of them should be redirects to the third one. ::Like Mythril Wyrm noted above, most people are interested in one game only, so the users don't really mind whether all the articles have been named in a constant way or not, as they only ever see one of them. And I also think that we should have no incoming links to any disambiguation pages -- they are pretty much a necessary evil, if you ask me. We definitely must have them, but in an ideal world people would never find themselves on those pages, unless they specifically want to, in which case they can find their way to them. ::—ZeroOne (talk) 22:58, June 2, 2017 (UTC) :::So if I read this right, there are least seems to be some support for changing something like List of units in Civ3 to "Unit (Civ3)" if/when enough additional information is added to that page to make it "more than just a list". An additionally desired criteria for changing a list to a regular page also seems to be if it has a Civilopedia entry in the game. Seems fair enough so far. :::An additional benefit to migrating away from "List of units in Civ3" to regular "Unit (Civ3)" pages (note the singular rather than plural) is easier linking via the various "Link" templates, such as . Thus, for plural, "units" becomes "units", or better still " s". Singular usage benefits by not even needing to add an "s" after the template in this case. :::Categorization also sees some minor benefits, since such pages will no longer show up under "L" by default. Russ3Z (talk) 13:04, June 13, 2017 (UTC) ::::If we are to rename the lists, the plural forms would make more sense to me. We can always have redirects from the singular forms. —ZeroOne (talk) 22:35, June 13, 2017 (UTC) :::::I would still argue singular has advantages that plural lacks. General wiki naming policy prefers a singular name (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog for instance), for one. Second, as noted above, a plural form would essentially render the very convenient "Link" templates useless, since while they can easily convert a singular article to plural by adding an "s" after, they can't convert a plural to a singular when needed. A redirect from the plural to the singular is just as easy. Russ3Z (talk) 00:17, June 14, 2017 (UTC) ::::::Well, Wikipedia has many policies and some of them are quite reasonable, but we're not Wikipedia. In the "Dog" example it makes sense since the page explains the concept of "dog". In our context we don't need to explain the concept of unit as much as we need to list them and their features. A trivial counterexample that matches our use case more is the List of dog breeds. Note that it's not plain "Dog breeds", so it seems that Wikipedia prefers the naming format "List of x". —ZeroOne (talk) 22:05, June 15, 2017 (UTC) ::::::Also, I would compare our "List of x" articles to categories, and category names use the plural form. —ZeroOne (talk) 22:07, June 15, 2017 (UTC)